Resetting Nintex Forms Repeating Sections

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed to reset a Nintex Forms Repeating Section? I’m sure you’ve tried to reset different columns from within your Nintex Workflows and It’s actually easy to reset any type of fields like Yes/No, Single Line of Text, etc.. But what about the Repeating Sections?

First of all, why would you need to do so?

In my case, I had two lists; one for the orders and the other is for the order details. I’ve created a 1:Many relationship between both lists.

In my case, I wanted to use a Repeating Section only as a way for inputting data into another list (a Nintex Workflow on the parent list is being used here to parse the repeating section and create the child items in the second list.). I wanted this Repeating Section to always be empty and ready for data input. Unfortunately, this was not straightforward due to the fact that the Repeating Section data is always stored as XML either in a list column if the repeating section is connected or in a hidden field called “Form Data” if the repeating section is not connected.

What if you want to remove the data altogether from the repeating section after the form is submitted? Theoretically speaking, here is what you need to do:

As the figure suggests, you need to strip out all the node values and keep only one row in the repeating section. You will end up with something like the below:

You can definitely use the “Update XML” action to do the trick … Or you can use my custom action from here.

Here is how you can configure the custom action:

The good news is that the action is smart enough to detect whether the selected repeating section is connected to a column or not .. and it works in both cases.